| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Edmund S. K. Fung. In Search of Chinese Democracy: Civil Opposition in Nationalist China, 1929–1949. (Cambridge Modern China Series.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2000. Pp. xviii, 407. $64.95.

Chinese understandings of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law are of great interest both to historians and to political scientists interested in China's political situation today. This book by Edmund S. K. Fung builds on Andrew J. Nathan's Chinese Democracy (1986) with a fascinating history of liberal and democratic thought in the 1930s and 1940s, combined with a detailed study of the various democratic parties and institutions of the period. Fung argues that Chinese intellectuals had a clear and plausible understanding of democracy even if they were unable to implement their ideas. He also claims that democracy was not always seen as being in contradiction with Chinese nationalism: for liberal intellectuals, democracy and human rights were essential to the building of a strong modern state even at the height of World War II. 1

The book begins with an excellent introduction to the period. Fung is at his best here: terse, opinionated, and interesting. He does not mince words, describing Nationalist Party ideology as "simplistic, incoherent, and incapable of being fully understood" (p. 40) and the regime as "military, repressive, corrupt and incompetent" (p. 50). And yet he is sympathetic to the pressures under which the party and government were acting: he takes seriously the various suggestions for "democracy within the ruling party" during the 1930s and can understand why some intellectuals who were deeply committed to liberal ideas felt that they had to accept the Nationalists (and later the Communists) as the only plausible national government. . . .

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